System Design Interview Prep Material

System design is a very broad topic. Even a software engineer with many years of working experience at top IT company may not be an expert on system design. If you want to become an expert, you need to read many books, articles, and solve real large scale system design problems. This repository only teaches you to handle the system design interview with a systematic approach in a short time. You can dive into each topic if you have time. Of course, welcome to add your thoughts!

Table of Contents

System Design Interview Tips:

Clarify the constraints and identify the user cases Spend a few minutes questioning the interviewer and agreeing on the scope of the system. Remember to make sure you know all the requirements the interviewer didn’t tell your about in the beginning. User cases indicate the main functions of the system, and constraints list the scale of the system such as requests per second, requests types, data written per second, data read per second.

High-level architecture design Sketch the important components and the connections between them, but don’t go into some details. Usually, a scalable system includes web server (load balancer), service (service partition), database (master/slave database cluster plug cache).

Component design For each component, you need to write the specific APIs for each component. You may need to finish the detailed OOD design for a particular function. You may also need to design the database schema for the database.

Good Books:

Object Oriented Design:

Tips for OOD Interview

Clarify the scenario, write out user cases Use case is a description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful. Who is going to use it and how they are going to use it. The system may be very simple or very complicated. Special system requirements such as multi-threading, read or write oriented.Define objects Map identity to class: one scenario for one class, each core object in this scenario for one class. Consider the relationships among classes: certain class must have unique instance, one object has many other objects (composition), one object is another object (inheritance). Identify attributes for each class: change noun to variable and action to methods. Use design patterns such that it can be reused in multiple applications.